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One of my fave things in York Minster: a medieval wren stalking a spider. It reminds me that history isn't only kings and battles. Someone, centuries ago, found joy in the same things we still notice today. It's a reminder of how much we have in common over our differences
"The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land."
G. K. Chesterton, Clearing Customs.
Continued from Part One.
A Foreign Land.
After completing my photography of the ancient half-timbered building, before I leave York entirely, I return to continue my journey through York’s snickelways - a meandering medieval counter narrative to the formality of the Roman footprint that still dominates the heart of York. The snickets, alleys and ginnels breathe life into the imperial rigidity, oxygenating the city centre with porous crossings and encounters.
I think of the snickelways as the city’s subconscious - the in-between places where we, momentarily, loosen our grip on the versions of ourselves demanded by the streets beyond. For these alleys aren’t just places of transition - they are also places where we gather ourselves, pause and rest. I’m starting to think that it is the very nature of these in-between places that frees us from the expectations and preconceived ideas of arrival. They hold us in the moment.
Over in Hornpot Lane I stop and think of St. William’s College - the building I have been photographing here in York.
I think of its deep history of ebb and flow, of redundancy and renaissance. My job is to record its rooms and courtyards before it moves on to its next stage of use.
To do this, I walk a linear route through each room - through a forest of struts and beams, an arborous narrative crossing countless thresholds that are, in spite of the obvious signs of redundancy, a complete revelation.
Alice Maddicott, in her book Tender Maps, conjures up the notion of human beings being ‘living maps’ or ‘map vessels’, by which, when we move through places, ‘we absorb something. That our experience is not disconnected, that it inhabits the places we walk through, and those places contribute to it…We are connected to our landscapes; we take them with us as we keep moving. We are always moving.’
Always moving.
From the arch-braced bones of St. William’s College into the rattling, wattled snickelways of a city full of wonder, I have a growing sense of becoming richer for it.
In the brick-lined snicket of Hornpot Lane they found a fourteenth-century pit that contained the remains from the horn-making industry. The view that awaits me as I walk through is so engrossing that it might have been supplemented by angels blowing on horns aplenty, made in this place several centuries ago for this very moment.
Chesterton once wrote that the object of travel is to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land. I don’t think I understood what he meant until I turned into Hornpot Lane.
Channelled by the confines of a monotonous stretcher bond, at the end of the lane is an old church tower with honeyed walls, capped with ruddy handmade tiles. Framed by the ginnel and forged by this light, it looks like something out of a fairytale. I walk up to another threshold, a gateway that obscures the church, and start rattling through the churches I know. I’m convinced that I’ve never seen this before - so magical in its revelation. The snicket holds it within its grip before releasing it into the fullness of its setting as I move through the gateway.
But then, as I walk around to the south side of the church, there is a flash. A deep intake of breath. A divine disorientation. The new becomes the familiar. The tectonic plates of the city, as I have always known them, suddenly shift beneath my feet. This is not a new discovery at all, but a place I have known and photographed for more than twenty years: Holy Trinity in Goodramgate - a place I captured at Candlemas for the Churches Conservation Trust many years ago.
I’m in thrall to a moment that unsettles the very nature of seeing. How can somewhere so familiar feel so utterly unknown? It isn’t the church that has changed, but my own perspective.
I cannot help but wonder how much of the world we lose by mistaking familiarity for understanding. Modernity rewards certainty, speed and the shortest route from one destination to the next. Yet the spirit of a place - and perhaps of people too - is so often found in the slower way round, in the unexpected crossing that unsettles what we thought we already knew.
For me the greatest journeys ask us to travel no further than a different way of seeing.
There is something profoundly hopeful in that. We spend so much of life chasing the new that we forget how much resides inside the familiar. Sometimes all it takes is another route and another point of arrival, where the obvious becomes extraordinary and the unknown within the familiar casts new light on the world around us.
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“We play, we create through the places in which we move through our lives, we gather them in from outside and re-gift them imaginatively.”
Alice Maddicott, Tender Maps
If the snickelways are the arteries of York, then the buildings are its bones.
The place I have spent a day photographing is St. William’s College - a fifteenth-century home for chantry priests, built to sustain the rhythms of medieval devotion before shapeshifting, century after century, into other uses.
It is a truly remarkable building - a microcosm of York itself. Its timber frame has remained while life has continually found new ways to inhabit it. Walking through its rooms felt less like moving through architecture than through the accumulated memory of change, adaptation and re-use.
York Minster has taken on the huge task of releasing the beauty of the building from the constraints of its twentieth-century straight-jacket.
My visit revealed a conservation project rooted in care and understanding, allowing the building to reveal itself through the lightest of interventions. There is a generosity in that approach - an understanding that our work is not to impose ourselves on the past, but to give it the chance to speak again.
I have the extraordinary privilege of photographing this building as it comes back to life. And this time, I’m bringing the subscribers of the Genius Loci Digest with me over the coming year as it is emerges from the shadows.
York Minster, through its careful approach to conservation, is re-gifting this place to the present generation. By photographing and sharing that journey, this is my gift to you.
Membership Offer - My Snickelway book
I'm giving away my second edition copy (with some of my own annotations added inside) of Mark W. Jones' Snickelways of York to the next Member to sign up.
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Born Slippy
After some time I feel like an imposter. I’ve spent far too long here, so I plough on through the rest of the building without a planned break. After completion, I sign out and step back into the great walled city of York.
Read on:
Andy Marshall
How Photography Taught Me How To See
Stopping and taking time to observe is an act of faith in the material truth that surrounds us. It washes away the fake news, discomfort and confusion of present times and helps me feel rooted.
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Andy Marshall
For Members - The Snickelways of York - Pure Scroll
A vista of visuals from my snickelway journey exclusive for members only.
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Kind words from a subscriber:
Andy your work is becoming wonderful, remarkable. A so-called breakdown has been milled into its constituent parts, becoming profound construction: through perception, architecture, the lens and the pen. In your Repton crypt essay a deep description of our social anxiety - and our reason to be....
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Photographs and words by Andy Marshall (unless otherwise stated). Most photographs are taken with iPhone 17 Pro and DJI Mini 5 Pro.
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